Engineering TTM

Welcome to Engineering TTM!

2009-06-05T10:35:00.002+05:30

Peter Drucker once said, "Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed." Indeed it is, and hence we had come up with a solution to ease the way to organize schedule of work in an institution. In fact, we had designed the TIME TABLE MANAGEMENT software. It could alleviate the cumbersome task of time-slot allotters to check for integrity and redundancy of allotted slots.

So why a TIME TABLE MANAGER? The answer is so simple - because of a variety of applications it could be put into. Consider an airport - there is a schedule for planes, a schedule for staff, a schedule for maintenance, a schedule for security drill... the list goes on and on. Again, take the case of a college - there are time-slots for faculty, students, clerks, maintenance... again the list goes on and on. The most important fact is that - all these are interrelated to each other - redundancy is most likely to happen. Take the case of a teacher X teaching class Y at a given time, and the time-table allocator assigns another teacher Z to the same class at the same time! Z would be losing his/her time and there would be unnecessary chaos. Quite undesirable, isn't it! It would be much better to restrict the choices during slot allocation rather than to create this entire chaos!

Also, there was an urgent need of software to maintain time-table in some college. More ever, we were about to be given a Second Year Project Assignment dealing with Data Structures, Object Oriented Programming, Microprocessor Programming and Computer Graphics! Taking this wonderful opportunity, I (Abin) along with Sujay and Yogesh, started off to form a team of THE THREE MUSKETEERS, with an aim to learn, coordinate and deliver.

We thought it would be apt to share the way we created this software. We had started with a 16-bit C++ environment, creating Database and Query handler from scratches of code, making Graphics APIs which are 100% reusable and communicating among team with phone and internet only. Our primary aim was to learn stuff, coordinate with each other and deliver the most professional result.

We expect the first and second year students will get a lot to learn from this blog. Hope you catch with us for further posts in the blog!

With regards,

TTM Product Team

Beta/Check-Build Release

2009-05-24T15:36:00.007+05:30

After beating several odds, we humbly present the demo version of TIME TABLE MANAGER. At present, two versions have been released (click to download):

The first version could be used to evaluate the graphical experience and strength of the software. The second is a CHECK-DEBUG version which could be used to carry out debugging and data recovery, in case of a program crash.

Some DO's:

While creating a new record, click the right arrow (not left) to get the rest of available class, staff, etc. In the future, we may provide distinct colors (RED/GREEN) to identify the presence of data to the right or left.
Enter the required time-slot in an eight-digit format (hhmmhhmm), without any alphabets or space. Even though we have kept input digit-only restriction, incomplete data field is possible. For example, if the time slot is 8:30 to 9:30, the input should be "08300930". Also, there is no support for 12/24 hour format.
One age-old but important advice - Always save your data before you EXIT. No confirmation would be asked.

Some DONT'S:

This program has been developed using 16-bit compiler and works only with full-screen enabled. As such, it is compatible only with previous version of Windows Vista.
Do not try to delete any record, once they are created. The program may crash! The problem seems to be in the way the record is deleted (in the allocation of memory). We would try to rectify this error in the future versions.
Do not try to delete any class, staff etc. names (strings). On deletion, the main database records containing those strings are not deleted. Hence, if you insert a new string immediately after that, the contents of the deleted string are virtually transferred to the newly created string.
The RELOAD option may not work. Actually, it will not work. We are facing some problems with it. So, as an alternative solution, you could close the application, without saving and restart it. It's that simple!

Feedback:

This is the first release of this product. Even though we have tried our best to keep it stable, errors may creep in from somewhere. In such a case, we request your help in reporting the bug to us. Please mention the problem along with the cause and exact way of reproducing it. This would help us greatly to increase its stability and integrity. Thanks in advance!

Bug Reporting:

You could report a bug or request a feature by posting a comment in this post.

Guidelines on Comments

2009-05-10T00:18:00.001+05:30

As the community participates in the TTM blog, we want to offer some guidelines on how we are going handle comments in general. Our primary goal is for this to be a place for open discussion about Engineering TTM Project, so we don't want to have lots of overhead and process.

We love comments. We know everyone on the TTM team will be watching for comments and is looking forward to the dialog. We will work to make sure that the software programmers represents themselves as such, especially if they work on TTM.

Things we want to see in comments:

Lots of good interesting responses on this project
Keep it on topic
Keep it respectful
Keep it fun

Things that will get comments edited/deleted:

Offensive or abusive language or behavior
Misrepresentation (i.e., claiming to be somebody you're not) - if you don't want to use your real name, that's fine, as long as your "handle" isn't offensive, abusive, or misrepresentative
Blog-spam of any kind

We hope these rules will keep the discussion lively and on topic.

With regards,

Abin Abraham Alichan (abin-aa@live.com)
Yogesh Bhumkar (yogesh.hifi@gmail.com)
Sujay Agarkar (adchpun@live.com)